Mission Journal

27 results arranged by date

Irrespective of
whether South Africa actually implements the most draconian parts of state
secrets legislation now under consideration, the media in the continent's most
open democracy already feel under threat. The prospect of 25-year jail
sentences for journalists publishing "classified" information has galvanized
disparate news outlets and journalists groups to work together like never
before.

The former guerrillas of the Sudan People's Liberation Army
(SPLA) fought a 22-year civil war for greater autonomy and civil rights for the
southern Sudanese people, culminating in South Sudan's
independence this July. But local journalists fear the former rebels turned
government officials still harbor a war mentality that is unaccustomed to
criticism, and that they are not prepared to extend the freedoms they fought
hard to attain. "We are still recovering from a war culture," Oliver Modi, chairman
of the Union
of Journalists of Southern Sudan, told me. "There is just too much
ignorance toward the press. We are not used to systems, structures--even the
media," he said, pointing to a list of eight documented cases of attacks
against the press this year.

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The turning point in President
Rafael Correa's aggressive campaign against the private media, Ecuadoran
journalists say, came in July with the criminal defamation convictions of four managers
of the Guayaquil-based daily El Universo.
Bad went to worse when the paper's former opinion editor and three of its
executives were sentenced to jail and fined, along with their newspaper, a total
of $40 million over a piece that called the president a "dictator." Emilio
Palacio, who wrote the critical op-ed that infuriated Correa and motivated the
lawsuit, fled
the country last
week after saying that he is being persecuted and justice will not be served.

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Turkey is awash in media. The newsstands of Istanbul are
buried under some 35 dailies of every format and political stripe. The airwaves
are thick with TV channels and Internet penetration is tracking an economy
growing at Chinese speed. Yet quantity does not equal quality. Nor does the
array of titles mean diversity and freedom of expression is blossoming in a
country that is seeking to join the European Union.

Two
years ago, as she was leaving home on a hot Wednesday morning in Grozny,
several attackers forced Natalya
Estemirova,
the prominent journalist and human rights defender, into a car. A young witness--who
later fled for fear of reprisal--recalled that Estemirova cried out she was being
kidnapped and that a white Lada sedan then sped off. Estemirova's body was
found a few hours later, ditched along a road near the village of Gazi-Yurt in
neighboring Ingushetia.

Mikhail
Beketov can walk now--using an artificial leg and propping himself on crutches. He's
moving around his house in the Moscow suburb of Khimki. It was here, in his
front yard, where the newspaper editor was attacked two years and seven months
ago. It was in this yard where assailants left him for dead. The fact that Beketov can stand on his own again is testament
to the sheer strength of the man, whom friends describe as a born fighter. He
could be obstinate, they say, and that's why he would never turn away from what
he believes in.

The tension between objective news reporting and advocacy
was the subject of the final plenary panel
that I moderated last week at the Global Media Forum in Bonn. Sponsored by
Germany's multi-language, government broadcast agency, Deutsche Welle, the three-day conference brought
together journalists and experts from every continent to address but not
necessarily resolve the media's role in covering human rights abuses.

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Senegalese journalists say justice is not on their side when they are victims of abuse by powerful officials or security forces. I met recently in Dakar with journalists targeted with criminal acts in apparent reprisal for their work. In these two high-profile cases, CPJ has found evidence of political influence on the judiciary.

After months of planning and preparation, our CPJ team
had assembled in Islamabad with an ambitious plan. On May 3, we had a meeting
scheduled with President Asif Ali Zardari to discuss the country's failure to
investigate the killings of journalists. We also had positive indications that
our delegation would be able to meet with military officials and possibly even
representatives from the Inter Services Intelligence, or ISI, the country's
all-powerful spy agency.

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Keiko Fujimori and Ollanta Humala, the two candidates for
the June 5 presidential runoff in Peru, barely raised freedom of
expression issues during the political campaign. So Friday's event organized by
the regional press group Instituto Prensa y Sociedad (IPYS) in Lima provided a
great opportunity to measure their commitment on press freedom, especially
important for candidates with questionable democratic credentials.